Graphics, Imaging, and Games Lab

Earlier this month I gave a tech talk to the undergraduate society here at Carleton.  These are my slides:

I've been working on mapping out a new set of locations to visit in our QR code adventure app, Carleton Quest, which we want to have ready for this fall's frosh week.  A big requirement was to reduce the amount of time it would take to visit all the locations.  This meant fewer locations, or at least more locations that are very close together.  This is the map we came up with.

This is a rough road map of the problems that need to be solved by our coherent emergent story system.  You can learn a bit more about this project via the poster we presented at GRAND 2013.

1. Applying prerequisites and assigning scores to scenes using modifiers:
   1. What are the best modifiers to use in calculating a scene’s score?
   2. What is the best way to calculate the score (e.g. a simple formula)?
   3. How will gameplay (e.g., movement/location, combat (?), explicit choices through dialogue or menus) affect the values used in the calculations? (It should be strongly connected.)
   4. How can this approach direct players into a certain path according to their choices (for example, losing too much innocence might change what story paths are available for the rest of the game)?
2. Deciding when and how to present scenes to players:
   1. When should a scene be chosen from the top scoring scene(s) to be offered to the player? Alternatively, when should a scene be available anytime so long as its current score is above a threshold? (can use tags to facilitate?)
   2. When should players be given a choice about consuming a scene and when will a scene’s presentation be triggered automatically? (design questions, make sure to support with framework)
   3. When there is a choice, how can it be creatively presented to the player? How can we foreshadow the consequences of choices?
3. Modifying scenes dynamically:
   1. When and how should we dynamically change a scene to connect back to the story the player has seen so far? (Dialogue, objects, motifs, location)
   2. How should we modify a scene to fit in with current game state (e.g., location, character availability)?
4. Ambiguity + development of threads -- thematic, character arcs
   1. How can we encourage multiple interpretations of core story events?
   2. How can reoccurring motifs be introduced into scenes in a meaningful way? (e.g. through objects that can be in the environment, colours, etc...)

I wrote a summary of this year's GRAND meeting from my perspective on my personal blog:

Last week, I attended the annual meeting of the GRAND (Graphics, Animation, and New Media) research network, held in Toronto.  Although the research and discussion presented and held at the conference spanned much more, the focus for me was on games and stories in games.

Read the whole post here.

I was invited to speak at the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference in Montreal this January.  These are the slides from my talk on interactive storytelling:

I went to another conference this week and wrote about my experience on my blog:

I went to Montreal on Wednesday to present my work on what makes augmented reality good for learning (and in general, really).  The conference was the World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare & Higher Education (or just E-Learn for short).  It was an interesting experience, but in the end, not entirely satisfying for me personally.

You can read the whole post and see my presentation slides here.

Last week, I attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Baltimore.  I wrote up a few blog posts on my personal blog about the conference:

• The Road to GHC12 is a picture-filled post about our road trip through Vermont and Connecticut on our way to Baltimore.
• Lili Cheng: Creativity, Learning, and Social Software (GHC12) is about a really cool group at Microsoft Research called FUSE Labs (they make Kodu!).
• Go Lean, Go Agile: Are We There Yet? (GHC12) is my take on the discussion about agile software development.
• NSF Funding Opportunities and Effective Proposal Writing Strategies (GHC12) offers what the title says; I also talk about how the advice relates to one of my own projects.

In just over a week, hundreds of students (mostly in grade eight) will descend upon Carleton for our annual mini-courses.  This year, a colleague and I will be doing something a little different in our course:

I've wondered in the past how important interactive storytelling might be in educational games.  The  potential to use story for more than just engagement seems high.  In just over a week, a colleague and I are going to run an experiment that will test how useful (not necessarily interactive) story is in teaching computer science concepts to complete beginners.

Read all about it on my personal blog.

Andrew Wallace and I just got back from an interesting two-day event on Montreal this past weekend called Experiencing Stories with/in Digital Games.  I wrote a bit about the experience on my personal blog:

You've probably heard it before: we've got a long way to go in finding artful ways to meld great storytelling with the traditional mechanics of digital games.  Being a computer scientist, I usually see the attempts of improving the state of the art from the technical perspective, but this past weekend I got to learn more about what the humanities researchers in academia and the writers, artists, and designers from industry have been doing at the Experiencing Stories with/in Digital Games colloquium held in Montreal.

You can read the rest of the post, and check out my live notes online (please excuse spelling, grammar, and formatting issues).

Our lab made a trip to Vancouver for SIGGRAPH 2011 this past August.  I wrote about my own impressions of the conference and some of the game papers I liked on my personal blog:

• Impressions of SIGGRAPH 2011
• Game Papers at SIGGRAPH 2011 (Part 1 of 2)
• Game Papers at SIGGRAPH 2011 (Part 2 of 2)